‘There’s a trace I can’t make out. Burnt plastic and dead flesh. Whispered violence and names buried deep. We forgot something important.’ (Virginia Creeper)

Hailing from Richmond, Virginia, and featuring members of Ostraca, .gif from god have been active for the past decade.  Dissimulation is the band’s second full-length and follow-up to 2019’s Approximation Of A Human.  Their sound continues to be one rooted in harsh metallic hardcore intrinsically braided through with spasms of chaotic screamo and blast beat fuelled eruptions of barbarous grindcore.

The resultant battery, even though judiciously leavened with sombrely reflective instrumental interludes, is utterly punishing in its cacophonous intensity.  An intensity that is only heightened by the six-piece’s dual vocalists as they frenetically unleash death metal growls, abrasively feral shrieks, and occasionally more melodic leaning expressions with an unhinged abandon.  It is a seething torrent that powerfully evokes the album’s primary theme of how technology has morphed into a tool calibrated for capital extraction and social control.  Surveillance capitalism as our rather bleak collective future.

Tracks such as Virginia Creeper and Life Like A Sickness capture the band at their most visceral.  However, the breadth of the moods and textures that the band are fashioning is, perhaps, best personified by the side two opener, Gift From God.  Mournfully skeletal piano and looping percussion are joined by the resonantly rumbling bass before morphing into a grandiosely metallic, clean sung crescendo.  This then dissolves before reformulating itself into an altogether more menacing groove, before a savage climatic breakdown.